Why State should make free education priority

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous day break to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”

That was Martin Luther King Junior on August 28, 1963 in the historic speech, ‘I have a dream.’ More than a half a century later, the African still is not free! Poverty still oppresses the black man, and so does disease, hunger and ignorance.

Fifty years later, we have a black man leading the world’s largest economy but in that country too, black men still do the worst paying jobs and rank among the lowest in the economic and social ladder. Five decades later, African countries have broken the chains of colonisation but black men now die in the Mediterranean Sea making illegal crossings into Europe in search of a better life in the land of the very colonisers they chased away.

Fifty years later, down south the black man is under threat from his fellow black man, natives up in arms against ‘foreigners’ whereas they have not yet taken over the white men’s places they so much fought for during apartheid. More than a half a century after Martin Luther King Junior had a dream, the black man still is not free!

For years without end, Africans have envisioned a time when they would live high quality lives. It’s worth noting that there is nothing wrong with this process of development, as it is the same path many developed countries we know today followed.

In fact, countries like France, USA and many others have a far much worse history than many African countries, having gone through bad governance by kings who didn’t care about the common man, civil wars, struggle against colonial powers, bloody revolutions and many other terrible situations to attain the stability and prosperity they enjoy today. However, having learnt lessons from the countries that went before us, we Africans should not fall into the same mistakes.

From the days of Martin Luther King, through the days of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, Africans have been struggling to get the fundamental rights to take off. However, I feel we have been getting so close yet we miss by a little. Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was clear in his vision that the biggest problems we face are disease, poverty and ignorance. Why so many Kenyans face the same problems 50 years after independence, I can’t tell.

Thirty years later came Nelson Mandela, who also had a vision of the path Africans should pursue to prosperity. According to Mandela, ‘Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world.’ Two decades later, Africa is yet to adequately educate her children and youth to take on the world.

Since the beginning of the world, God gave man the mandate to fill and subdue the earth. The endeavour to subdue the earth has for centuries now been a matter of brain, not brawn. Today, the world is dominated by brainy inventions such as the Internet and so on. Wars are won no longer by muscle but by invention, like the atomic bomb did in 1945.

Millionaires and billionaires are now built, not through expansion of physical empires, but by inventions like Facebook, Google and even older ones like dynamite, which was invented by Alfred Nobel and helped him become one of the richest people in Europe.

Under this trend, the society that best feeds its people’s minds then emerges as the strongest society in today’s world. We may have many problems such as poor healthcare and poverty, but to become competitive, we must first empower our people through education.

I believe the failure to educate its people has been one of the major undoing of the African society. Africans don’t need to land in Europe as illegal immigrants; with the right papers, they can get there as the much sought after doctors, teachers, pilots and so on. South Africans don’t have to chase their fellow Africans from South Africa so as to get jobs; with high academic qualifications, they can easily get even the jobs the whites are holding.

In fact, Mandela told them exactly that: “Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”

So many African successes, including our own Obama senior, have all emerged through education. It’s not in doubt that by failing to provide high quality low cost education to all Africans, we may be losing many more potential African success stories.

For Kenya, and many other African countries, this will be the solution: Make education fully free all the way from nursery school to university. A heavy investment this will be, but the outcome will be far more beneficial than the cost. This we must do, this we should do!